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Another Look At Intel's Lynnfield Linux Performance

09-23-2009, 10:00 AM

Phoronix: Another Look At Intel's Lynnfield Linux Performance

Earlier this month we provided a launch-day preview of the P55 Chipset on Linux along with benchmarks from the Core i5 750 and Core i7 870, which are the new quad-core Lynnfield processors. We noticed some odd performance issues under Linux when testing out these new processors, but Intel has since chimed in and we are in the process of running an updated set of tests.

Personally I'm a little confused by the i7/i5 series on our platform. Are these cpu's optimised for the kernel? Why si that major distros force people on AMD64 opcodes when both AMD and Intel have unique abilities that surely can make a difference in cpu operations.

Maybe someday I'll have to learn how to build my own kernel, like I did in early days when I tried linux.

Comment

It probably doesn't mean what you think it does. AMD64 pretty much means "the 64bit CPU architecture that AMD designed and which Intel's desktop 64bit CPU's are based on too" afaik. It has nothing at all to do with CPU optimizations. It just says that the system is 64bit x86 computer (and not Itanium or Sparc64 or whatever), nothing more.

Comment

Yep, AMD64 is just AMD's brand name for the x64 architecture, which Intel calls IA64. Both have the exact same intsruction set, just like they both implement the same x86 instruction set to remain compatible with each other. AMD64 is sometimes used instead of x64 simply because they were the ones who designed it and were the first to implement it. IIRC, Intel was thinking of creating their own competing 64bit architecture, but MS had already started working on an AMD64 port of windows and said they wouldn't support a 2nd 64bit architecture.

Comment

Yep, AMD64 is just AMD's brand name for the x64 architecture, which Intel calls IA64. Both have the exact same intsruction set, just like they both implement the same x86 instruction set to remain compatible with each other. AMD64 is sometimes used instead of x64 simply because they were the ones who designed it and were the first to implement it. IIRC, Intel was thinking of creating their own competing 64bit architecture, but MS had already started working on an AMD64 port of windows and said they wouldn't support a 2nd 64bit architecture.

No that is wrong. IA64 is Itanium. Intel's AMD64 implementation is called EM64T.